NYT : Report Stirs Debate on Terror Fight

Report Stirs Debate on Terror Fight

By BRIAN KNOWLTON | International Herald Tribune | September 24, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 — An American intelligence assessment that the war in Iraq has increased Islamic radicalism, worsening the terror threat, set off a sharp debate today among lawmakers and other political figures over credit and blame for the war and the broader fight against terrorism.

“The National Intelligence Estimate provides jarring confirmation that the disastrous policy in Iraq is a giant recruiting poster for terrorists,” Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, acknowledged on CNN that “the war in Iraq has intensified Islamic fundamentalism and radicalism,” although he added “that’s a problem that nobody seems to have an answer to.”

But the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, used language that echoed that of President Bush, saying that “either we are going to be fighting this battle, this war overseas, or it’s going to be right here in this country.”

The White House, apparently concerned that reports of the intelligence assessment could undercut one of its most fundamental arguments for staying in Iraq, quickly issued a statement seeking to rebut points about it that were reported in The New York Times and later in The Washington Post today. The Bush administration does not normally comment on classified intelligence matters.

The statement pointed out that President Bush has often spoken of the decentralization and dispersal of terrorist groups around the world, and it reiterated his frequent cautions that the terrorist threat remained potent. It noted that Osama bin Laden had declared the war in Iraq to be the most “serious issue today for the whole world.”

The strong words illustrated the extraordinary sensitivity in the debate over how to deal with the threat of terrorism and the stormy political blame game about who has done more, or should have done more, or would do more, to fight it.

“There is a real battle going on to define who is going to keep America safer,” the commentator Arianna Huffington said today on CNN, summing up the political stakes in this election year.

The intensity of feelings over the terrorism issue could be seen today when “Fox News Sunday” showed an interview with former President Bill Clinton, which was taped before the intelligence assessment became public.

When an interviewer, Chris Wallace, asked Mr. Clinton why he had not done more to pursue Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda, Mr. Clinton became visibly upset.

He leaned forward to angrily tap the clipboard in Mr. Wallace’s lap, and blamed “conservative Republicans” for trying to scare Americans and make terror a political issue.

Mr. Clinton noted that he rarely criticized Mr. Bush on the battle against terrorism, but then asserted that the Bush administration had done too little to fight Al Qaeda in its time in office before the Sept. 11 attacks.

“They had eight months to try,” Mr. Clinton said. “They did not try.”

The new intelligence report implicitly questioned assertions from Bush administration officials that the United States is now safer from terrorism than it was before Sept. 11, 2001, if not yet entirely safe, and that it would be less so under Democratic leadership.

Democrats seized on the intelligence assessment for new ammunition to criticize the Iraq war and Mr. Bush.

The assessment “should put the final nail in the coffin for President Bush’s phony argument about the Iraq war,” Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement.

And Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said, “President Bush should read the intelligence carefully before giving another misleading speech about progress in the war on terrorism.”

When, on CNN, Alexander M. Haig Jr., the former secretary of state for President Ronald Reagan, belittled the report as the product of liberal journalists, Richard C. Holbrooke, the United Nations ambassador under Mr. Clinton, said it was an astonishing thought that the nation’s entire intelligence apparatus might be doing the bidding of Democrats.